The MANIAC
Three stories (physicist Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, AlphaGo) circle the question of what happens when the human mind creates something it can no longer understand. Labatut's hybrid of fiction and nonfiction about the terror of intelligence is the most urgent book about AI written in novelistic form.
After the nuclear stakes of the von Neumann section, the closing Go match drains the tension for several readers, one admitting the shift to a board game “really kind of deflated the book for me”. With so many narrators speaking about von Neumann in turn, the individual voices blur together for some into a “shallow or underdeveloped sense of voice” rather than each testifier getting a distinct presence. A critic goes further, arguing the final section’s editorializing about AI “starts to sound like a stale thinkpiece” more than a novel proper. At least one reader found the writing itself “interesting but much to long”.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
